Month: March 2007

It has actually been rainy here this last week. Cloudy days and rain for a short time 3 or 4 of those days. It’s a nice change. We haven’t had any real heavy rains yet, but it’s enough to disrupt my laundry…

Had my first class with my new teacher. It went well, if this is any indication I should do well with the new guy. I’m going to have a mini “Easter Break”, it’ll be good to take some time off. Maybe I should go somewhere….

OK, the rest of my pictures should be up shortly. I’ve noticed the fact that all of the pictures I have taken have been snapshots as opposed to “serious” shots. Part of that is due to equipment limitations. The little digicam I have Simply cannot cope with the really wide dynamic range that I routinely see. That together with high noise at high ISOs makes some shots impossible. The bigger reason is that it just isn’t a priority for me. I’m actually having fun recording where I’ve been instead of trying to “accomplish” something. Part of me is really glad I left the huge photo system back home…

Woke up yesterday morning and we had no water. As I left, they were filling a reserve tank. I came back several hours later and there was water! Brown water, but water… What the hell good is it to have water that you can’t use? later that night, the internet across the entire city went down….grrr. The water today is only slightly brown. It never smelled, I assume that it was due to oxidation in the tank outside, but still, ewww!

Michael (my remaining housemate) out of the blue asked me if I wanted to go to Houdada tomorrow. It’s a smallish fishing village on the Red Sea. Sounds good to me, we might also go to another village nearby and make it a two day trip. We’ll have to see if he can arrange a car and driver on such short notice, but I’m optimistic, he’s been here many times before and knows a lot of people in these sorts of jobs. With any luck I’ll be swimming in the Red Sea this time tomorrow!

Mmmmm, Michael took me over to a Chinese place today. Next to Mexican food, this is what I have been craving the most. I ordered spring rolls, chicken fried rice, chicken with cashews and some white rice. I expected to take home the extra but I ate all of it instead. I even ate a fair amount of his food! Man was it good, a really nice change from my usual stuff. What else is going on… not much really. I better hit the books, class today was a disaster…

My retirement account’s value has swung more than 6 percentage points in the last two weeks. I’m on the positive side now (by almost 4%) but wow. One of my housemates swore that he was going into all bonds because of the volatility… I’m sticking to this for the long term, I view this latest up and down as akin to a roller coaster ride…

I read a children’s story in class the other day, and I’m thinking that I understand the screwed up world view many here have. It’s a lovely story of a guy that wants a nice big house made of wood. He decides that he’ll go into the forrest and cut down some trees. He finds the blade to his axe, but he doesn’t have a handle. He goes to the forrest and talks to the trees. Now this is an important part of the story, the trees are sentient. The man explains that he needs a small piece of wood in order to make a handle for his axe. The trees agree to give him the wood as long as he goes away and doesn’t come back. He makes his axe handle and heads right back to the forrest. The trees are surprised and they ask him why he came back, he had agreed to go somewhere else. He explains that he really wants the house and where else was he going to get the wood? He proceeds to cut down all of the trees and the trees express regret that they helped him at all. The man builds his house and enjoys it…

What the hell kind of story is that to tell to kids? It’s OK to lie and to kill in order to get what you want as long as you have the weapon… Actually, this explains a lot, I wonder how many other stories are like this? I understand that many fairy tales have horrific and gruesome story lines, but there is a difference. In the fairy tales, the monster is always seen as evil and as such we expect them to be bad and to do bad things. In many stories, there is some sort of downside to being evil. This particular story involves a “normal” guy and there are no negative consequences to breaking his word or even of murder. Pretty scary…